The End of August

Another earnest attempt by film-makers gripped by that proselytising zeal which affects those who read good novels (in this case, Kate Chopin's The Awakening). After some years of married restraint in turn-of-the-century New Orleans Creole society, Edna (Sharp) abandons propriety and exchanges her life of comfort, dependence and 2.4 kids for the Bohemian Way. More vitally (and shockingly), she rejects the duty of the conjugal bed in order to find sensual and sexual fulfilment between the sheets withthe charismatic Arobin (Shenar), and on a more cerebral plane with the callow Robert (Grant). Regrettably, the film finds no satisfactory substitute for reflective insights into the female mind, condemning the well-acted characters to a two-dimensional existence and inadvertently relegating Chopin's work to the genre of 'local colourist' from which she endeavoured to escape. A potboiler.